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THE 

JOHN HOWARD McFADDEN 

COLLECTION 

OF 

PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 
OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL 



AN APPRECIATION AND INTERPRETATION 
WITH CATALOGUE 






















■ 





•A- 





































JOHN HOWARD McFADDEN 

AFTER A BUST BY F. LYNN JENKINS, I919 


4 





vv 


■AAA-u^q_ u _vv\, fcr' v_Q_rtJ 


A. 

1 




THE 

JOHN HOWARD McFADDEN 

COLLECTION 


OF 

PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 
OF THE BRITISH SCHOOL 


from 


HOGARTH, 1697-1764, to LIN NELL, 1792-1882 


AN APPRECIATION AND INTERPRETATION 
WITH CATALOGUE 




MCMXXIII 




?5 


Copyright, 1923 
By J. B. Lippincott Company 










A TRIBUTE FROM HUNEKER. 


“ Even before the new additions the McFadden collection 
was unique. There may be of course private collections of 
old English masters in Great Britain which rank with this, but 
with them we are not acquainted. One must go either to the 
National Gallery or Hertford House to find their match. Mr. 
W. Roberts, who is admittedly the greatest living authority and 
expert in this school, wrote an illuminating article in the 
Nineteenth Century magazine concerning English masters in the 
McFadden and several other private collections, and stated his 
reasons for his unqualified admiration of the Philadelphia 
pictures. Some years ago we added our mite of appreciation. 
No doubt the ideal collector lives with his treasures, and this 
Mr. McFadden has done. His old home in Rittenhouse Square 
was a pictorial feast because of the tactful disposition of each 
canvas, of the exquisite adaptation of every and all masters 
to their surroundings. The Reynoldses, Hogarths, Lawrences, 
Constables, the old Cromes, Raeburns, David Coxes, Hoppners, 
Turners, the dramatic sketch of Lady Hamilton by Romney, 
the Morlands, Gainsboroughs—these and the others make a 
glorious concert for lovers of mellow paint and charming forms 
and scenes.”— James Gibbons Huneker, 1917. 




3 



THE JOHN HOWARD McFADDEN COLLECTION. 

An Appreciation and Interpretation. 

The John Howard McFadden collection of masterpieces, 
portraits and landscapes of the British school of the Eighteenth 
and early Nineteenth Century, is more than a distinguished 
collection of two score and three canvases from the hands of 
one less than a score of painters. By reason of a central 
guiding idea, which controlled the collector during the thirty 
years that he was making his selections, with a keen insight 
and a singularly happy faculty for getting the right painting by 
the right painter, the pictures tell the story of the flowering 
of a great civilization which has been the admiration these many, 
many years of painters, poets and philosophers who have never 
tired of setting out its finer side, which, as Lord Acton once 
remarked, is the side by which the character of all civilizations 
are judged in the estimates of all time. 

The collection as if by inspiration—though the first picture, 
and a great one, “ Lady Rodney ” by Gainsborough, No. 8, 
was secured as early as 1893 and the last by Bonington in 1917 
when the collection took what was its final shape—anticipates 
the revised judgment of today as to the men and the works 
that make for epochs in art in that its oldest and its most 
historic canvases are the two paintings by Hogarth, “The 
Assembly At Wanstead House,” No. 13. painted about I 7 2 9 > 
and “The Family Of Sir Andrew Fountaine,” No. 14, dating 
from about 1735. For upon Hogarth’s works it is now realized 
the whole British school, up to the middle of the Nineteenth 
century, rests securely. And it is especially significant that 
long after Mr. McFadden had realized the supreme significance 
of Hogarth in a collection of the type he was engaged in get¬ 
ting together, the splendid Tate gallery in London, which, 
originally, was to have been given over solely to British paintings 

5 


“ after 1790,” decided recently to start its period from the days 
of Hogarth. Running as the collection does, therefore from the 
very dawn of the Eighteenth Century almost to the early 
meridian of the Nineteenth, it is no accident that this presenta¬ 
tion of the blithe and happier side of that civilization of pedi¬ 
greed privilege and position and sturdy yeomanry, that has so 
many engaging phases in the beauty of the women, the distinc¬ 
tion of the men and in the charm of a countryside that is never 
without its picturesque human element, high and low, should 
range over the most famous hundred years in the annals of art; 
the century, let us say roughly, from the Hogarth of 1735, 
“The Fountaine Family,” to the Turner of 1835, “The 
Burning of The Houses Of Parliament,” No. 41. Nor is it 
any accident that the seeming exceptions in the collection, the 
Hogarth canvas which was painted before 1735 and the two 
landscapes by Cox, No. 5, and Linnell, No. 17, which are later 
than 1835, all belong in character to this century, and in all 
their essentials of manner and methods and outlook illustrate 
its life with a certainty and a completeness that is unequalled 
in any collection devoted to the same group of painters anywhere. 

For the outstanding and significant fact of this collection is 
that the collector did just what he set out to do. There is no 
picture that is not a perfect type of the artist and his time. 
More than this, the paintings themselves have a reasoned inter¬ 
relationship that reveals and explains every phase and feature 
that have made the British school of the century in question 
the glory of the people and the nation. All the qualities of the 
school that, at its best, searched for character and found it not 
only in the personality of its portraiture of those who moved 
in the higher walks of life, but also in the individuality of the 
panorama of the English countryside and in the lesser, but more 
human, pictorial episodes of farm and furrow, cottage and 
canal, lane and lawn, all enveloped in a landscape drenched no 
less by the romances of history and by the poetical association 
of centuries of bards and “ singers of the live-long day ” than 
by the “ showers sweet ” of Chaucer and by all the fleeting 
physical phenomena of broken light and shade, rain and shine, 

6 


silvery dawns and saffron twilights in a northern clime of low 
sun, long shadows and subtle contrasts of misty distances. 
There is no sinister note in the collection. Even the Hogarths 
are the Hogarths of elegance and refinement in the home and 
in the summer gardens of luxury and culture. His two paintings, 
after the older manner of the Seventeenth Century Italian “ con¬ 
versations,” both in their presentation of people of position in a 
salon and then against a landscape background, which back¬ 
ground has a high historic value, give the keynote to the 
collection. The coarse caricature and the biting satire of the 
Hogarth of the “ Rake’s Progress ” and the ways of the bawd 
in bagnio and back alley, are missing and were not wanted. It 
is again, consequently, not an accident that the collection began 
with Gainsborough’s “ Lady Rodney ” and that today this 
celebrated work still remains the pivotal picture despite the 
impressive fact, though figures and statistics mean so little in 
a collection of this kind, that there are eight Romneys and eight 
Raeburns to dazzle the visitor and draw away the attention 
from the brilliant artist of Bath and London, who was enough 
of a fashionable rival to Sir Joshua Reynolds in portraiture as 
to win from him the invidious remark that Gainsborough was 
“ the greatest landscapist of his time.” For the “ Lady Rodney,” 
it must be noted, secured by Mr. McFadden a generation before 
two continents became almost hysterical over the translation of 
Gainsborough’s “ Blue Boy ” from England to America in 1922, 
and, what is more important to note, painted in the same year, 
1770, as the “ Blue Boy,” presents the indentical turquoise 
colors that have given the “ Blue Boy ” its great reputation. 
In every aspect, “ Lady Rodney,” this vision in ethereal blue, is 
another challenge of Gainborough to those who held that a 
picture “ in which blue was the dominating note could not be 
successful.” Moreover nothing in the collection is more subtle 
than the color scheme of “ Lady Rodney ” as is shown in the 
relation of the blue in the gown with its gold edges and the 
yellow bullion and jeweled accessories of the toilet, to the 
delicate lilac of the scarf, the white of the sleeves and the quiet 
flesh tones, all in a low key against a dark background 


which throws the figure out with an almost Rembrand- 
tesque assertiveness. 

With the “Lady Rodney ” setting the standard for future 
acquisitions it is interesting to note, in view of what might 
be called the truly royal character of the collection that in 
Gainsborough, Wilson and Reynolds three of the founders of 
the Royal Academy, established in 1769 are revealed, while ten 
members of the Academy in all are represented and two pres¬ 
ident, Reynolds and Lawrence. Reynolds, the first president, 
it will be remembered accepted the position after Benjamin 
West, born on what is now the campus of Swarthmore College, 
a green-lawned suburb of Philadelphia, Mr. McFadden’s own 
birthplace, had declined it, West becoming the second president 
and being succeeded in turn in 1820 by Sir Thomas Lawrence 
who is brilliantly represented in the collection by his “ Miss 
West,” No. 16. Of necessity Reynolds must be mentioned 
immediately in connection with Gainsborough since if his por¬ 
trait of his friend and the friend of America, the celebrated 
statesman and orator “ Edmund Burke,” No. 30, as a young 
man, painted in a quiet and reserved manner, can hardly dis¬ 
pute with the attractions inherent in the elegances of a woman 
of high estate, yet even dignified serenity in blue can hardly 
hold its own when the very heart of sentiment, that is never 
sentimentality, is given in Sir Joshua’s “ Master Bunbury,” No. 
29, one of the signal masterpieces in the collection. Moreover 
when sentiment is mentioned it is an easy transition from 
Gainsborough and Sir Joshua in this collection to Romney who 
was saturated with it and and thrived on it. Later in “ arriv¬ 
ing,” in the famous year of 1775 when the three made the 
great artistic triumvirate in London, Reynolds in his fifty- 
second year, Gainsborough forty-eight and Romney just passed 
forty, the last named was “ overwhelmed with sitters ” and in 
his febrile and even whimsical manner, a man of many moods, 
produced masterpieces as quickly as the conjurer draws rabbits 
from a hat. There is not one of Romney’s eight canvases, 
which have given this collection so unequalled a reputation 
across seas, that are not worthy of the most intense study and 

8 


admiration. For if Sir Joshua gives you a great public 
character in Burke,” Romney, as Mr. McFadden has brought 
it about, directly challenges you with a finer portrait of 
Reverend John Wesley,” No. 37, the founder of Methodism. 
This canvas has ever been recognized as the definitive por¬ 
trait of this great spiritual leader and it was so deftly and so 
searchingly limned by the artist as if by sudden inspiration, 
that the divine said it of himself, “ Romney struck off an 
exact likeness at once and did more in one hour than Sir 
Joshua did in ten.” 

Again if Gainsborough takes you into the circle of the 
distinguished women of the day in his “ Lady Rodney,” Romney 
not outdone comes up strongly in the grand style in his magnifi¬ 
cent salon portrait of “ Lady Grantham,” No. 36. This lovely 
composition, a beautiful woman in a creamy white dress with 
a rich rose pink overdress, buff bodiced, bejewelled as to ears 
and hair, and seen against a richly luminous autumnal back¬ 
ground, is one of the high lights of the collection. It sums up 
all that one expects of portraiture of the women of the period 
and by its very brilliancy brings up all the other Romneys to a 
high level, though each has its own special charm; “ Mrs. De 
Crespigny,” No. 32, in eloquent black and her friend “ Mrs. 
Crouch,” No. 31, the actress, in the intentional simplicity of 
white, and the inimitable studies of “ Mrs. Finch,” No. 33, “ Mrs. 
Tickell,” No. 35 and the head of “Lady Hamilton,” No. 34, 
as a Bacchante or Miranda, all seemingly improvisations in which 
the artist is seen to brilliant advantage with sympathetic sub¬ 
jects whom he delighted to honor. Indeed if he could paint the 
“ saint ” in his Wesley in so convincing a manner as to make it 
the Wesley, that he had a tender brush when the “ sinner ” 
was concerned is shown in that that alluring and famous bit of 
feminine baggage, Lady Hamilton, inspired his brush early and 
often. If his fervent admiration also turned Mrs. Tickell 
into a sort of Egeria, all three of these smaller canvases of 
women, the studio divertissements of a master, represent the 
very romance of portrait compositions, while the Romney group 
as a whole culminates in a most ingratiating phase of his art 


9 


through his fanciful study of childhood entitled “ Little Bo- 
Peep,” which calls for special attention all by itself. 

To journey from London to Edinborough in order to 
admire the work of Sir Henry Raeburn, somewhat ex¬ 
travagantly if currently, called the “ Franz Hals of Scotland ” 
or the “Velasquez of the North,” is much more easily done 
through the medium of this collection, overwhelmingly rich 
in its eight examples of his work, than it would have been in 
the Eighteenth Century. Here again the idea back of the 
collection which ever controlled the selections not only brings 
the eight Raeburns into a new and comparative relationship 
with each other, but likewise, all the other distinctly English 
portraits into a friendly rivalry and comparison with a Scottish 
group of unsurpassable attractiveness. Raeburn may have had 
a reputation for excelling in his men, Henley says he “ need 
not vail his bonnet to the best ” in this respect, and certainly 
“ braw ” portraiture, as the Scotch would say, can go no 
further than is revealed in the three profoundly impressive 
studies of the bluff, ruddy-faced, full-cheeked, finely-humored 
individuals of the Northern squirearchy, the portraits of “ Mr. 
Lawrie of Woodlea,” No. 26, “ A Gentleman In A Green Coat,” 
No. 28, and “ Sir Alexander Shaw,” No. 27. Choice is, in¬ 
deed difficult, but, as lovable as the “ Lawrie ” is and as 
intriguing as the benign “ Man In The Green Coat,” in the 
“ Shaw ” the full and complete exposition of human character 
and personality in color and design comes to a climax. But 
as if this were not enough, aside from his masterly study of 
two lads and his interesting portrait of a true dandy, “ Colonel 
Charles Christie,” No. 25, practically a full length in miniature, 
as it were, the Raeburn method reaches the heights which nor 
Reynolds, nor Romney, nor Lawrence can even dispute in his 
portraits of “ Lady Elibank,” No. 22, and “ Lady Belhaven,” 
No. 21, the first named being an almost sculpturesque concep¬ 
tion of a breezy type of rose-flushed healthy womanhood, in 
a golden ochre and brown attire, painted with daring brush 
work hit out from the shoulder, without mahlstick as was his 
wont, in the broadest of manners and against a formal architec- 


10 


tural background. This canvas is in striking contrast to “ Lady 
Belhaven, ’ a woman celebrated for her beauty, who is painted in 
so smooth a style in white as to reveal no brush strokes, the 
art that conceals art reaching here a true triumph of presenta¬ 
tion. Then, too, that the Scottish school was not wholly summed 
up in Sir Henry, Sir John Watson Gordon’s authoritative 
portrait of “ Sir Walter Scott,” No. 42, reveals the pupil, since 
he once studied with Sir Henry, in as successful a delineation 
of a celebrity as the master. And the “ Scott,” much admired 
and often engraved, with the “ Burke ” and the “ Wesley ” is 
not the least considerable human document in the collection. 

As all know, while the triumvirate of Reynolds, Gains¬ 
borough and Romney ruled contemporaneously in London and 
stood before kings without abashment, to say nothing of lords 
and ladies, in their latter days a new sun arose and the collection 
has a signal example of the work of that aspiring “ younger 
fellow,” Sir Thomas Lawrence, who, a mere infant when Sir 
Joshua became president of the Royal Academy in 1769, came 
to sudden fame in 1789, when, scarcely out of his teens, he 
painted “ Nellie Farren ” with an assurance and an audacity that 
suggested the mature and resourceful ability of a veteran 
rather than the flash-like precocity of a beginner. Beauty for 
Lawrence was its own excuse for being, and his reason for 
painting it. And though through the unfortunate destruction, 
by fire, of a lovely work of his, the portrait of “ Miss Nelthorp,” 
in Air. McFadden’s home, Sir Thomas is represented alone by 
his “ Miss West,” No. 16, this is representation enough to 
reveal his genius, since his one canvas, a glorious presentation 
of one just out of her teens, depicts the radiant “Rose of 
Kent,” the well known nickname for the “ Miss West ” and in 
this truly exquisite canvas, exquisite in subject and treatment, 
Lawrence is seen at his very best. If the gift of genius, which 
led him to achieve an early masterpiece in the “Nellie Farren,” 
later took on the mellow assurance of acknowledged accomplish¬ 
ment, by which his sitters were translated into a world of his 
own, it were inevitable that, faced with so lovely a subject 
as “Miss West,” flushed and flustered as the story goes by 


11 


reason of her failure to arrive on time at the artist’s studio, 
Lawrence should do something superlatively fine. And he did 
not flinch or fail, so this beautiful girl, black as to hair, blue as 
to eyes, in white, with a blue sash and a crimson scarf, is the 
kind of “ speaking likeness ” that speaks to all time, and that 
it is characteristic of the school that was still holding its own 
in the first two decades of the Nineteenth Century, after its 
triumphs of the Eighteenth through the famous triumvirate, is 
praise enough. Though Lawrence is credited with only one 
canvas, he shines also through the compelling work of his 
pupil, Harlow, three of whose canvases grace the collection. And 
yet the single picture which tells its own story so well in the 
case of Lawrence does so again in the case of Hoppner, whose 
very engaging portrait of his wife, No. 15, in a garden hat 
bound with blue ribbon in contrast to the warm fawn and 
ivory-toned gown and black shawl, is truly English and one of 
the unexpected minor delights of the collection. Hoppner’s 
painting also possesses an interest for America in that his 
wife was Miss Wright, the daughter of the famous Mrs. 
Patience Wright, the American sculptress who lived in London 
and was a friend of Benjamin West, and whose son, Joseph 
Wright, brought over to America, on his return, the traditions 
not only of the West atelier but those of Hoppner, with whom 
he studied. And since, in turn, Hoppner is viewed as one of 
the continuers of the Reynolds manner, the determining re¬ 
lationships of the American school of Stuart, Peale, Sully, 
and their confreres—a score or more of them having gone over 
to London and studied there under West while appropriating 
all the hints that the works of the leaders of the British school 
afforded them—is thus indicated. For there is no greater 
certainty in art than that just as the British school through 
Hogarth and his immediate predecessors, Sir Peter Lely, 1618- 
1680, and Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1646-1723 reach back to Van 
Dyke, 1599-1641, so the American school of portratiture rooted 
itself in the work of the century so comprehensively presented 
in this collection. 

And there being no question about it that if the British 
school touches high water mark anywhere it does so in the 


12 


pictures of the family and in the interpretation of the care-free 
charms of childhood, one turns to this collection for this vital 
phase of a national art and one is transported by what it con¬ 
tains of unaffected artless loveliness, so far as paint can render 
it. At the very start one finds in the two portraits of two lads, 
young lairds, by Raeburn, the official child portrait that is, 
however, not without a penetrating human appeal. The study 
of “ Master Thomas Bisland,” No. 23, with its contrasts of dark 
clothes and white lace and its free pose is set off most effectively 
against his study of “ Master John Campbell of Saddell,” No. 
24, all in white, while the dramatic episodic backgrounds in both 
cases show Raeburn a master in a field which he was said “ to 
neglect,” but to which alleged “ neglect ” the picturesque back¬ 
grounds in five, out of the eight pictures in this collection, give 
a lively negative. Modulating from the official simplicity of 
the two lads by Raeburn, if one would hardly classify the 
incomparable young womanhood of “ Miss West ” by Lawrence • 
as representing childhood, Harlow in the two Leader family 
groups, Nos. 10 and 11, puts you in friendly touch with the 
very intimacies of family life, showing childhood and girlhood 
as only happy and healthy youth knows them in a sort of open 
air if patrician jollity. Then after you have been prepared by 
the grace of these groups for something finer, the whole 
collection reaches one of its great moments, in so far as the 
external and adorable motif of mother and children can do it, 
in his extremely beautiful picture of “ Mrs. Weddell and 
Children,” No. 12. This is a canvas to reckon with. It evokes 
memories and more than compares favorably with Sir Joshua 
Reynolds’, “ Lady Cockburn and Children ” and other similar 
groups and if Harlow had never painted anything else but this 
canvas, had been in fact a sort of “one-speech” Hamilton or 
a Blanco White with one sonnet to his credit, but that a master 
work, he would have achieved an easy immortality. The riotous 
and roguish abandon of the children, their laughing and 
cherubic beauty, the equal riot of color, the very carnations of 
health in mother and child adding to the emotional effect, with 
an ecstacy of devotion pervading the group, mother-love and 

13 


childlike affection and concern being equally balanced, all go 
to make this one of the canvases of the collection, to be worth 
the starring and double starring after the continental fashion 
in museum catalogues. And then, as if to gild the refined gold 
of this kind of representation of the joyous side of child life, 
the collection passes beyond the lively appeal of the real into 
that higher realm of the ideal and scores twice in Romney’s 
fanciful “ Little Bo-Peep,” No. 38, and Reynolds’ “ Master 
Bunbury,” No. 29. Though the latter is an actual portrait, it 
possesses that haunting charm that is above and beyond the 
surface effects of face and figure. And the little brooding, 
wistful boy, looking out of the frame with a strange wonder¬ 
ment at the scene before him, sums up the assence of all 
childhood, and the poignancy of the long, long thoughts of 
early youth, and suggests those things that are too deep for 
laughter or tears. A masterwork, one of the gems of this 
collection, it throws the gauntlet to Sir Joshua’s own famous 
picture “ The Age of Innocence ” and it is easy to believe the 
pleasant anecdote that it was because the artist was so enamored 
of the picture after he painted it in 1780-81 that he never left it 
out of his possession until he willed it to the gratified mother 
on his death. If there be a premonitory sense of solemnity 
about the “ Master Bunbury,” Romney’s bewitching little 
shepherdess is a Strephon and Phyllis masquerade, an Eigh¬ 
teenth Century idyll of child life, which by its pictorial simplicity 
leads all genre works of this type. The insinuating appeal of 
a design determinedly naif plus lovely color can go no further 
in conveying an indelible impression and it is eloquent of 
Romney at the very height of his career on the golden side of 
his half century. 

But if, as this collection so definitely shows, great por¬ 
traitists, such as Romney and Raeburn to mention the two so 
abundantly represented here, epitomized the men and women of 
their time and the kind of life that made Great Britain of that 
period dominate all Europe, there were among their contempor¬ 
ary artists great masters forsooth who excelled just as pointedly 
in the depiction of the rare beauty of the unforgettable English 

14 


countryside, a countryside that was and is quite as famed as 
the people and the proud families in song and story. And here 
again the flair of the collector has brought about a series of 
cross relationships between the landscapes, following up the 
leading idea, that pulls them together and gives a quality and 
a glamor to their appeal which lifts them above the purely 
scenic and historic. If the open air study by Hogarth, the 
“ Fountaine Family,” the oldest landscape and the oldest oil for 
that matter in the collection, gives a hint of a certain type of 
formal scenic presentation in which the trees are studio trees, 
fleecily generic, and indicating very little of specific foliage, this 
kind of conventional treatment of the green and somewhat 
indefinite background continued through Wilson, the next 
painter of landscapes in the order of time. As it happens, 
however, the Wilson in this collection, the “ Westminister 
Bridge,” No. 43, is a cityscape and emphasizes other phases 
of the painter’s art not always freed from artificiality. Yet 
the classical tradition held and the Hogarth hint as to tree- 
embroidered distances, as a rule wholly Italianate in origin in 
so many Eighteenth Century canvases, is worked out to the 
fullest flowing and poesy of the older style in the classico- 
romantic “ Landscape ” by Gainsborough, No. 9. This is one 
of the most distinguished canvases in the collection. In this 
idealized and arranged bit of scenery, the river flowing be¬ 
tween distant and blue hills, with the cool greens of the 
interlacing trees and the crystalline waters, under a pellucid 
sky, there is presented a type of painting which became the 
very pattern and fashion for all landscapes for many years, and 
repeated itself finally in a glorified manner in the works of a 
Turner. For Turner, the greatest genius of them all, although 
he considered himself to be in competition and in comparison 
with Claude Lorraine alone, Claude having been likewise the 
patron saint of Wilson, at the same time the painter of the 
pomp and circumstance of sea and land was really indebted to 
Gainsborough for those conventional and sublimated elegances 
of landscape which even he, Turner, felt moved to paint as 
against the more intimate, the more idiomatic and emotional 

15 


actualities of the English countryside that are so supremely 
revealed in this collection through the works of Stark, Stubbs, 
Cox, Crome, Constable, Linnell and Bonington. That Wilson’s 
very architectural “ Westminster Bridge,” No. 43, painted in 
1745, should be here to confront Turner’s grandiloquent paint¬ 
ing of the same actual structure in connection with his elaborate 
fantasy, “ The Burning of the Houses of Parliament,” No. 41, 
painted in 1835, after the destruction of the buildings in October, 
1834, is one of those cunning cross references which the 
collector enjoyed making that give an additional meaning to 
each canvas, even if Wilson is seen in a formal style not much 
removed from the rigidly realistic manner used by his favorite 
Italians, Guardi and Canaletto, in depicting Venetian vistas. 
For the inclusion of the two pictures enables one to see what 
ninety years of development in the art of landscape had done 
in England and what Turner himself, heir to earlier experi¬ 
ments, could do with a scene which would defy most brushes 
and be let alone by most artists. It is in an imaginative work 
of this type, by Turner in his most characteristic phase, the 
phase that Ruskin could not praise too much, that the collec¬ 
tion glows, since so much of the past and so much of the 
future of British art is summed up in this livid and lurid and 
gleaming red and gold study of an historic conflagration, 
actually historic and happening in London and yet, as envisioned 
by Turner, belonging the rather to a mysterious fairyland 
evoked, as it were, by the brush of a Prospero. 

But if fame, not unmixed with controversy, garlands the 
Turner, the real glory of the English landscape school is 
established in this collection through Constable, Crome and 
Bonington—the last named the youngest of the group—pre¬ 
maturely dying at twenty-seven, who was the intermediary, by 
reason of his English birth and French bringing-up, between 
the school of Crome and Constable and the Frenchman of the 
1830’s who developed their “ paysage intime,” intimate country¬ 
side, out of the more than potential hints of the English masters, 
Constable in particular—and also through the oldest artist of 
the group, Linnell, who died at ninety in 1882. That the 

16 


collection should possess so delightful a Bonington, as his 
“ Normandy Coast,” No. i, and so dramatic a Linnell as his 
large canvas, “ The Storm,” No. 17, showing the advance of a 
black thunder cloud, lightning-riven, over a smiling foreground, 
is one of its great attractions. For if Linnell’s “ Storm ” is 
one of the finest Linnells in any gallery, comparing favorably 
with the much less dramatic golden harvest “ The Noon Day 
Rest ” and the lovely amethystine sunset, “ The Last Load,” in 
the Tate Gallery, London, it is of added significance that though 
this canvas was painted in 1853 it catches its spirit from the 
panorama of Constable’s “ Hampstead Heath: Storm Coming 
Up,” No. 3, a most inspiring work dating in the early 20’s 
This Constable is a prelude in every sense to this incomparable 
master’s full achievement. In the small, as it were, and ill¬ 
ustrating as if by intent his very cock-sure memoranda that 
“ my little studio at Hampstead commands a view without 
equal in all Europe,” it suggests within its modest compass a 
vast reach of open country instinct with the drama of contrasts 
of moving cloud and rolling contour. This Hampstead vista 
is in every way the essential Constable. It proves again as do 
its fellow studies in the Kensington Museum that the smaller 
canvases by Constable represent the very heart and soul of 
his art and method. They indeed are the rapt and radiant 
seizure of the subject seen in the open with an individuality of 
approach and of execution that makes the young miller of the 
Suffolk one of the world’s greatest landscapists. And while 
not missing the many-facetted charms of the smaller Constables 
one should not pass by at this juncture, the equally small but 
potential landscape at Volney by Crome, No. 7, which with its 
old oaks and its familiarity with the loveliness of the too often 
overlooked beauty of woodland nooks has an appeal that evokes 
those emotions which have been accredited more largely as 
effects coming from the works of Millet, Rousseau, Michel, 
Corot, Diaz and Daubigny of the Fontainebleau-Barbizon 
school than as coming from the British masters who led the 
way; though the deep appeal of the latter is inherent in the 
landscapists whom Mr. McFadden early appreciated at their 

17 


real worth and through whom the collection reaches its great¬ 
est level of historic and artistic achievement in the two other 
Constables, “The Dell at Helmingham,” No. 4, and “The Lock, 
Dedham,” No. 2. Though “The Lock” dates from about 1824 
and is the fountain-head of all pictures of this type painted 
by Constable in which his unprecedented “ impressions ” of the 
essentials of the English Countryside, sunlight shining on a 
rain-washed landscape, whose high lights of reflection give a 
brilliancy of white flecks on the soft blue-greens of the foliage— 
which effects, by the way, were referred to in his day, so 
identified was this then amazing method of transcription with 
him alone, as “ Constable’s snow ”—nothing can be more im¬ 
pressive in art than its differences from “ The Dell.” This 
slightly later work, painted probably in 1828, a master work 
of the most supreme kind, is as modern in manner as if it had 
come today from the brush of a Sargent—whose style is not 
unlike this piece of bravura by Constable—or had been thought 
out by an Inness. The picture is low in key, ochres, ivory- 
whites and gray-greens, and the paint is splashed on with a 
dash and an abandon that suggests the very fury of instant 
composition in the presence of the magic scene. You are look¬ 
ing into a dense white-barked copse, but the way is opened out, 
with a hint of paths in a clearing, to a white wall and a blue sky 
beyond that carries one far in more senses than one. The 
freshness of the canvas is one of the remarkable features of 
the painting. But, as intensely interesting as this inspired 
master work is, those who are concerned over the characteristics 
of the “ official ” Constable will turn to “ The Lock ” as a 
perfect example of his individual yet national style. If the 
Frenchmen on seeing this medaled work in Paris at the Salon 
in 1824 felt that it was suffused “ with dew ” it was because in 
this work, as in the famous storm-swept canvas of the Guild 
Hall in London, in which Constable is very near his most 
perfect form, the master is seen in full control of his palette 
and his subject, an intense and vital love for his own country¬ 
side which he knew, as few men have known it, guiding his 
hand to catch those fleeting effects of light and color which 

18 

\ 


are the very elements of a landscape in a climate in which rain, 
followed by the sun through broken clouds, is the expectancy 
almost any day of the year. It is all these “ local” things 
made universal by art that make the Constables in the collec¬ 
tion unique and which throw a reflected glory over the other 
landscapes since each of them plays its part in revealing that 
countryside and that homeside that Constable never tired 
of presenting. 

It is true in this puzzling and disputed matter of influences 
in art, that not only old Crome but Constable in their work 
suggest something akin to that found in the celebrated Dutch¬ 
men, Hobbema and Ruysdael, and their school, and it is also 
true that Crome expressed a great admiration for Hobbema, 
but one cannot stress this possible relationship too much, for, 
in a large measure, it is the likenesses between the 'English and 
the Dutch countryside, the low sun, the broken cloud canopy, 
the frequent showers, the glint and gleam of wet foliage, long 
panoramas over flat and far-reaching sunswept levels, that 
suggest the resemblances rather than any similarity of painting 
methods or even of points of view. Constable was a school in 
himself, saturate with individuality and there is nothing more 
British than Crome’s “ Woody Landscape at Colney,” No. 7, 
which compares worthily with his “ Poringland Oak,” viewed by 
all enthusiasts as Crome at his best and is sheer landscape. 
But if the Colney vista became the point of departure for the 
French school, and it was exhibited in 1810 long before the 
French landscapists had begun their varied careers, the other 
and larger Crome in the collection, “ The Blacksmith Shop, 
Hingham,” No. 6, which dates from 1808, is in every way 
original in every leaf and thatch and timber, the very glorified 
type of that cottage life which Morland set the pace for in 
his delightful depiction of “ Happy Cottagers,” No. 20, painted 
in 1793. These two paintings which adorn the collection, though 
the Crome was secured in 1896 and the Morland in 1916, com¬ 
plement each other and notably contribute to the central idea 
that runs through everything in the collection. The humanized 
aspects of scenery which the “ Blacksmith Shop ” and the 


19 


“ Happy Cottagers ” reveal so poetically are, of course, repeated 
eloquently in Morland’s “ Old Coaching Days,” No. 18, show¬ 
ing the Manchester coach invested with a sense of the romance 
of roadsides and the leisured easygoing life of the Eighteenth 
Century, the “ Merrie ” England of wayside inns, post-boys, 
Dick Turpin and Captain MacHeath with its gay adventures in 
public house and on hedge-lined highways, none too safe 
This is a canvas of first importance since it is typical of the 
kind of thing representing the anecdotal side of rural England 
that made Morland famous, since nothing human was alien 
to him. And yet that he was not unfamiliar with what may 
be called “ society ” in the city sense and was not wholly 
enamored of bucolic or rustic subjects is pleasantly revealed in 
that by reason of the collector’s happy selection the painter’s 
third canvas is an urban theme, a picturesque and lively 
presentation of town life among the successful and the opulent 
entitled “ The Fruits of Early Industry and Economy,” No. 19, 
in which Morland repeats the social motif of Hogarth’s “ Con¬ 
versations ” and vividly recalls in a picture so susceptible to 
reproduction in the familiar colored engravings and mezzotints 
those moralizing pictures of British life, such as “ Marriage 
a la Mode,” which had been made the rage by Hogarth before 
Morland was born. All this shows the continuity of certain 
styles of art produced by the great school of which both 
were members. 

While all the Morlands suggest the possibilities of pictures 
in black and white this is doubly true of the canvas by George 
Stubbs, showing a very English and very, as they say, “ truly 
rural ” scene, a group of yokels gathered about a cart, the 
landscape background, after the cooperative manner of so many 
Dutch painters being painted by another man, Amos Green. 
This picture, No. 40, quite warrants the reputation of Stubbs 
as the “ Reynolds of the horse ” through its perfect rendering 
of the old time cart horse, while the dog in the picture is put 
in in a masterly manner as only one who spent so much time 
on the anatomy of animals could do. The scenic accessory is 
somewhat in the formal style of Gainsborough, though with 


20 


contrasts of light and shade that belong to the later period. 
But the accentuation of the animals by Stubbs in his canvas is 
quite in contrast to another typical bit of English countryside 
the “ Landscape and Cattle,” No. 39, by James Stark in which 
the landscape is the more important feature of the picture. And 
the collector again with rare ability secures in this quiet canvas 
the same tree motif that gives the Colney picture of Crome its 
historic value. And it is this kind of repeated motif, glancing 
from canvas to canvas, which, it must be noted, is the thing 
that continually deepens the message of every picture in the 
collection. For if Bonington’s short Anglo-French life led 
him into an easy leadership by reason of his precocious talents 
so surely English, something of the same kind of outlook on 
nature is shown in the painting by David Cox, who outlasted 
Bonington by thirty years, entitled “ Going to the Hayfield,” 
No. 5. It dates from 1849 though it is inspired by the kind of 
thing that Bonington and Constable had done a generation 
before. Here again is the essential English countryside; level, 
with lush growths and an endless panorama with broken horizon 
ending in pearly distances and, over it all, that moisture-touched 
veil that gives beauty of tone and tint to things near and far, 
under a sunlight that softly illuminates but neither scorches nor 
burns, nor ever becomes garish even at midday. That the ten 
landscapists in the collection cover so wide a range through 
sixteen canvases out of the total of forty-three, is due to the 
fact that they have been selected for their historic inter¬ 
relationships in a manner that puts the collection far ahead of 
any other of its kind in this country. 

For, dying in 1921, in his seventy-first year, Mr. McFadden, 
for thirty years had had the extreme satisfaction that grows 
out of the collecting of things beautiful in themselves, works of 
art, which, year by year, not only increased in extrinsic value 
by reason of the widespread demand for characteristic works 
of European art of all the great periods, but which took on a 
new character and, as it were, became heightened in intrinsic 
stature by reason of their association with their fellow master¬ 
pieces. From the days of his early enthusiasms, when he 


21 


acquired the “ Lady Rodney,” the collection developed along 
the noble lines now familiar to the public, since the treasures 
have been theirs for years—following the tearing down of 
Mr. McFadden’s home in Philadelphia in 1916, in which year, 
indeed, he finally rounded up, to his own satisfaction, and in 
a way that seemed to reveal in him a special sixth sense as 
a collector, this most significant of all centuries of British art 
by his purchase of the eight pictures, which, in the full meaning 
of the word, “ completed ” his collection. These were the “ Sir 
Alexander Shaw,” No. 27, by Raeburn, the “ Lady Grantham,” 
No. 36, and “ Little Bo-Peep,” No. 38, by Romney, “ The Dell 
at Helmingham,” No. 4, by Constable, “ The Woody Landscape 
at Colney,” No. 7, by Crome, “ The Happy Cottagers,” No. 
20, by Morland, “ Westminster Bridge,” by Wilson, No. 43, and 
later “ A Coast Scene, Normandy,” No. 1, by Bonington. Dove¬ 
tailing, as these pictures did, in so felicitous a manner with 
the thirty-five which had already given the collection a name 
and fame, the supreme and final touch of unassailable authority 
was thus stamped on the collection as a whole. For it is self- 
evident that the pervading interrelationships, so marked and so 
happy a feature of the collection, are the result of the collector 
applying so successfully the ingenious and often ingenuous 
principle of “ livability ” in making his selections for his 
residence in England as well as for his home in Philadelphia. 
That is to say, choice instinctively fell upon those works with 
which one could live by reason of their subjects and, also, 
because they were harmonious within themselves and with each 
other, and, at the same time, faithfully represented the famous 
artists and the periods which were the object of the collector’s 
trained solicitude in developing the whole history of the British 
school. And so sincerely did Mr. McFadden adhere to his 
scheme of things that early in his collecting days he even gave 
up, without regret, a fine canvas by Velasquez, since he 
realized that it did not “ belong,” however valuable in itself, 
to the plan he had in mind. 

With the collection in final shape in 1916, and frankly yet 
modestly enjoying before his death the public appreciation that 


22 


came from tlie preliminary exhibitions of the collection, and 
generously desiring to honor his native city, it came as a logical 
consequence that Mr. McFadden’s will left the entire collection 
to Philadelphia, as announced by the City on February 28, 1921, 
to be an integral part of the art collections to be housed in the 
galleries of the great art museum, which now crowns the 
acropolis of Fairmount. Before the collector’s death, the 
occasional public exhibitions of the collection were as follows: 
From April, 1916 to December at the Pennsylvania Academy 
of the Fine Arts; from April 26 to June 15, 1917 at the 
Carnegie Art Institute, Pittsburgh, and from June to October 
of the same year in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of 
Art, New York. After being returned to Mr. McFadden’s new 
residence in Philadelphia they were loaned after his decease, by 
the trustees 515 of the collection to the National Gallery of Art, 
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, and were opened to the 
public there in July, 1922, pending the completion of the picture 
galleries in the Philadelphia Art Museum, their final home. 
In all these exhibitions the collection by the very force and 
fact of its humanized intimacies has ever given to the public 
galleries a sense of the salons and the well-ordered and 
amenable family life of the gentlemen and gentlewomen of the 
Eighteenth Century, and the pictures themselves have carried 
over not only these older traditions of the historic homes and 
private galleries of an older world, but a certain eloquent 
memory of their friendly association with the collector in his 
own home amid the tasteful and sympathetic accessories of 
hangings, furniture, rugs, and all those “ personalia ” that gave 
them their proper frame and made them live. With this 
“ indicated ” manner of display, which the paintings indubitably 
call for, realized in their permanent quarters in the Philadelphia 
Art Museum, then this well-ordered and inspiring collection will 
truly come into its own.—H. M. W. 

* The Trustees named in the will are Robert Von Moschzisker, Chief 
Justice of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania; George Wharton Pepper, 
Senior United States Senator from Pennsylvania; and Jasper Y. Brinton, of 
Philadelphia, Member of the Court of Appeal, Mixed Tribunals, Alexan¬ 
dria, Egypt. 


23 


JOHN HOWARD McFADDEN. 

John Howard McFadden, the donor of this collection to 
the city of Philadelphia, was born in Philadelphia, December 
3d, 1850, the son of George Henry and Charlotte Elliott 
McFadden. Of Anglo-Irish ancestry, Mr. McFadden, whose 
father was one of the pioneer cotton merchants of Philadelphia, 
was educated at the Episcopal Academy and on entering into 
business with his father, and with his brothers subsequently, 
became part of a great commercial enterprise with broad inter¬ 
national relationships. One of the senior members of the 
firm when he died on February 16, 1921, Mr. McFadden’s 
business activities were but part of a resourceful life given over 
to the promotion of cultural matters in private and public that 
looked to the advancement of the arts and the very scientific 
bases of modern civilization. Actively associated with the 
leading art and educational institutions of Philadelphia, by 
reason of his wide experience with the public affairs of two 
continents, he substantially aided the development of preventive 
medical science and gave liberally to the Lister Institute of 
London, established the John H. McFadden Research Institute 
of Liverpool and provided funds for the equipment of a labora¬ 
tory in the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine and also 
moneys for the fight against endemic diseases in the South, 
in his own country. Spending a considerable part of his time 
in England, Mr. McFadden was thus put in touch with the 
famous collections of art in the private and public galleries of 
Great Britain and the Continent and from these early contacts 
with the works of celebrated artists his gallery of masterpieces 
was developed, the pictures at first gracing his residence in 
Liverpool and later his Philadelphia home. 


24 


CATALOGUE 


PORTRAITS AND LANDSCAPES 

OF THE 

BRITISH SCHOOL 


RICHARD PARKES BONINGTON. 

1801-1828. 

Born in a village near Nottingham, where his father was 
the jail-keeper, as well as a portrait painter, Bonington with 
his father went to Paris, when a precocious boy of fifteen, but 
returned to England from time to time to study the works of 
Constable and the British landscapists and died like Keats in 
his twenties with his genius revealed but prematurely checked. 
The French masters while calling attention to his English poise 
were frank admirers of his talents, for of Bonington, in speak¬ 
ing of his genre studies, the celebrated Eugene Delacroix wrote, 
“ I could never grow weary of marveling at his lack of sense 
of effort and his great ease of execution. He could begin over 
again finished pictures that seemed wonderful, but his dexterity 
was so great that in a moment he produced with his brush new 
effects which were as charming as the first and more truthful.” 

1. A COAST SCENE, NORMANDY. 

Canvas, 23*4 in. by 3254 in* 

“ Bonington’s most successful pictures were his views in 
Italy and his scenes on the coast of Normandy.”—W. R. 

25 



JOHN CONSTABLE, R. A. 

1776-1837. 

The son of a miller, living in the valley of the Stour in 
Suffolk, England, and himself a very yeoman of the mill and 
race until eighteen, Constable, born near East Bergholt, died 
at Hampstead Heath, London, after a career which began as 
a Royal Academy student in 1799 where he was helped by 
Benjamin West, his first exhibition at the Royal Academy 
occurring in 1802, and which closed with him acknowledged as 
the leading landscapist of his time, he having become a member 
of the Royal Academy in 1829 and having gained recognition 
in London and in Paris at the various annual exhibitions as a 
man who held the mirror up to nature and did so with great art 
and little artifice, revolutionizing the painting of landscapes 
and inaugurating a new epoch in art. 

2. THE LOCK, DEDHAM. 

Canvas, 47 in. by 55 in. painted about 1824-1825. 

This version of a favorite subject by Constable is in a 
way a companion piece to the “ Lock ” painted for the Royal 
Academy in 1824 and still owned in England, but is viewed 
by experts as the finer of the two and the study direct from 
nature from which all other paintings of this type were derived. 
It gains special interest since it was probably one of the pictures 
by the British master exhibited in the 1824 Salon in Paris, which 
aroused such great enthusiasm among the artists of the day. 

3. HAMPSTEAD HEATH: STORM COMING.UP. 

Canvas, 23 in. by 29^4 in. 

The favorite haunt of Constable, after he became a resident 
in London, and his home from 1821 practically to the time of 
his death, Hampstead Heath has been immortalized by the 
painter in numerous canvases and studies and sketches, none of 
which surpass in the full revelation of the famous outlook this 
canvas, which reveals the Heath in one of its most pictur¬ 
esque aspects. 


26 


4. THE DELL AT HELMINGHAM. 

Canvas, 2g% in. by 37^4 in. 

Secured for this collection in 1916, this study of a dell in 
Helmingham Park, among whose boskage Constable delighted 
to paint in a solitude of romantic greenery, represents the art 
of the master at the most signal period of his life. As historic 
as the Park was since it dated from the time of Henry VIII, it 
gains today its chief interest through this astonishing study 
which is the very gem of all the landscapes in the collection, 
and as modern in its appeal as if it had been painted yesterday. 

DAVID COX. 

1783-1859. 

A color grinder and scene painter in his boyhood in 
Birmingham, the son of a silversmith and a worker and en¬ 
graver of metals as well as an assistant in the London theatres 
in his twenties, Cox became one of the founders of the British 
School of water colors and was prolific in drawings in water 
color, black and white and in paintings in oil. A contemporary 
of Constable, he carried on the traditions of the older man 
and added to the reputation of the British landscapists for 
their fidelity to nature seen in the small and in the large. 


5. GOING TO THE HAYFIELD. 

Canvas, 27 in. by 35 in. Signed and dated 1849. 

Though Cox painted much in the district of Wales much 
of which is in distinct contrast to the eastern coast where 
Constable and old Crome in Suffolk and Norfolk made the 
scenery their own, this painting with its long levels and lumin¬ 
ous sky still has the aspect of England proper and is typical of 
the rural low lands and level lands so thoroughly illustrated in 
this collection. 


27 


JOHN CROME (“ Old Crome ”). 

1768-1821. 

As thoroughly identified with Norfolk as Constable was 
with Suffolk and the founder of the Norwich school of paint¬ 
ing of which James Stark, his pupil, also represented in this 
collection, was a member, Crome the son of a poor weaver, 
called “ old ” to distinguish him from his son, John Bernays 
Crome, who also painted, was admittedly intrigued by the 
Flemish and Dutch school of landscapists though he remained 
solidly British to the end of his days and so far as determining 
hints went took his rather from Gainsborough than from the 
men across the North Sea. 

6. BLACKSMITH’S SHOP, NEAR 
HINGHAM, NORFOLK. 

Canvas, 45 in. by 58 in. 

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1808, Crome having 
been an exhibitor there since 1806, this perfect example of 
English cottage life represents the pictorial anecdotal art of 
Crome at its highest and it is among the earlier canvases se¬ 
cured for this collection. 


7. WOODY LANDSCAPE, AT COLNEY. 

Canvas, 16F2 in. by 22 in. 

Painted as' early as 1810 and identical with a series of 
etchings devoted to the same subject, this landscape, which is 
one of the earliest examples of the “ paysage intime,” the in¬ 
timate countryside, that supposedly affected the Frenchmen of 
of the 30’s, is wholly poetic in its appeal without human ac¬ 
cessories to give it an anecdotal or pictorial value and by reason 
of this is one of the most important smaller landscapes in 
the exhibition. 


28 


THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R. A. 

1727 - 1788 . 

The son of a clothier, apprenticed early to a silversmith, 
five years younger than Sir Joshua Reynolds and dying four 
years before his distinguished rival, with whom he divided the 
honors of the day as the painter of fashionable life in Bath 
and London, Gainsborough has gained an almost sensational 
name and fame, not only as one of the leaders of the British 
school of portraiture but as a landscapist who played an im¬ 
portant role in the development of this art in Great Britain, 
in a way being the last of the classicists and the first of the 
romanticists in the handling of formal and arranged scenery, 
painted both in the studio and directly from nature. 

8. LADY RODNEY. 

Canvas, 40 in. by 50 in. 

Henrietta, Lady Rodney, the daughter of John Clies, a 
merchant of Lisbon, where she was born, was the second wife 
of the famous Admiral, the first Lord Rodney, who married 
her in 1764, Lady Rodney, who died in 1829, at the age of 
ninety, surviving her husband by thirty-seven years. Painted 
about 1770 when Gainsborough was at the height of his career 
and was challenging his fellow artist with his bold experiments 
in color combination, this picture of Lady Rodney, using the 
same blue effects in her gown as that that made the “ Blue 
Boy ” painted in the same year, world famous, is one of the 
most typical of all of Gainsborough’s portraits of famous 
women and is the very keynote of the collection which has 
crystallized around it since it was the first picture bought by 
Mr. McFadden in 1893. 

9. A CLASSICAL LANDSCAPE. 

Canvas, 38 in. by 48 in. 

This landscape which represents the Italianate influence of 
Salvator Rosa and Claude Lorraine on English art through the 
influence of Richard Wilson who with Gainsborough was one 


29 


of the founders of the Royal Academy in 1769, is a synthetic 
treatment of scenery, picturesque in detail and as a whole, that 
set the pace for tree and sky and formal countryside effects 
for many years. 

GEORGE HENRY HARLOW. 

1787-1819. 

With his father a well to do East Indian merchant and 
associated from boyhood with people of quality, the Duchess 
of Devonshire being interested in his career as an artist, Harlow 
revealed early abilities and though he quarrelled with his 
patron and teacher, Sir Thomas Lawrence, he is viewed as 
having caught much of his inspiration in portraiture from 
Lawrence’s dashing and even audacious methods. Going in for 
all sorts of genres beginning with the historical, Harlow finally 
developed as a portraitist and, save Bonington, is the youngest 
artist represented in the collection, dying at the age of thirty- 
two on the very edge of a greater career. He represents the 
Indian-summer glory of the British portrait school, especially in 
his rendering of family life. 

10. THE MISSES LEADER. 

Canvas, 57 in. by 93 in. 

11. THE LEADER CHILDREN. 

Canvas, 57 in. by 93 in. 

These two canvases representing different groups of the 
Leader family children, and dating from about 1816, in back¬ 
ground and in general treatment reflect the student’s indebted¬ 
ness to the romantic style of his master, Lawrence, for his 
general scheme of design and color. The two sisters, were the 
daughters of William Leader of London, a friend of the 
artist, the girl with the harp in No. 10 being Anne Leader and 
her sister with the music Fanny. In the group of four, No. 11, 


30 


representing the younger children are seen the two boys, William 
and John and two girls, Mary and Jane. The family was 
prominent and the younger son, John, became a well known 
statesman and connoisseur and was intimate with the great in 
England and on the continent, the family wealth deriving from 
the grandfather of the children, William Leader, who was coach 
builder to the Prince of Wales in the Eighteenth Century. 

12. MRS. WEDDELL AND CHILDREN. 

Canvas, 2714 in. by 35*4 in. 

Exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1816, this painting, one 
of the most famous of Harlow’s works in which his art comes 
to a rich perfection, depicts a family group radiant in charm 
which gains an easy immortality through the painter, though 
almost nothing is known of them, except the name and the 
obvious relationship presented by the picture itself. Unquestion¬ 
ably one of the masterpieces of the collection it is one of 
the finest examples of the mother and child motif in British art. 

WILLIAM HOGARTH. 

1697-1764. 

The greatest satirist of British life above and below stairs, 
and the most characteristic, in a national sense, of the British 
school, was the son of a teacher and had a struggle to gain 
his name and fame, but, marrying into the Thornhill family, 
he succeeded his brother-in-law John Thornhill as sergeant 
painter to the king in 1757, though his fame by that time had 
been spread by leaps and bounds through his caricatures and 
cartoons and prints and engravings that depicted the beaux and 
the bullies and bawds of the day. Dying when Reynolds was 
forty-one, Hogarth was familiar with the circle in which 
Reynolds was the chief he having painted Garrick in 1746, and 
through many of his associates the traditions of British art of 
which he is held the founder were continued into the middle 
of the Nineteenth Century. 


3i 


13. THE ASSEMBLY AT WANSTEAD HOUSE. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 29^ in. 

Painted about 1729 the interior represents a conversation 
piece in the ball room of Wanstead House, Essex, one of the 
finest mansions in England, the residence of a great city magnate, 
Sir Richard Childs, who is seen sitting at the table. One of the 
earliest works of Hogarth in oils, it represents the society of 
his time and is a pivotal picture in the history of art, and was 
secured by Mr. McFadden in 1905. 

14. THE FOUNTAINE FAMILY. 

Canvas, 18 in. by 23 in. 

In contrast to the magnificence of the Londoner’s great 
mansion, the Fountaine family group takes one out into the 
park of a family of distinction and long line, Sir Andrew 
Fountaine the distinguished scholar and antiquary being shown 
with his sister and his niece and her husband who is hold¬ 
ing the picture offered to the connoisseur by Sir Christo- * 
phere Cock, the celebrated auctioneer of his day, the group 
dating from 1735 having been exhibited in London several 
times from 1817 on before the Fountaine collection was finally 
dispersed after 1884. 

JOHN HOPPNER, R. A. 

1758-1810. 

Born in Whitechapel, London, of German parents and a 
pensioned chorister of the king’s which led to a romantic story 
that he was of a left-handed royal relationship, Hoppner was 
an early exhibitor at the Royal Academy in his twenties and 
by the time he was thirty was one of the court painters and a 
rival of Lawrence. Despite his German origin and his Ameri¬ 
can wife, he was English of the English and so well did he 
represent the society of his day that a veritable craze set in 
for Hoppners in the Nineteenth Century which has kept his 
reputation among collectors green up to this very day and date. 


32 


15 . MRS. HOPPNER. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 30 in. 

This canvas one of the many portraits of his wife painted 
by the artist reveals her as a typical Anglo-Saxon, breezily 
fresh as to complexion and attired with a simplicity of garden 
hat and soft-textured gown and shawl that sets off her amiable 
countenance, and while carrying on, as has been said of 
Hoppner’s work, the “Reynolds tradition” as to portraits, in 
a way the canvas suggests the American school of Stuart 
which developed from the Reynolds-West ateliers, Hoppner, 
with his wife and her mother, the American sculptress being 
a frequenter of the West home which with Mrs. Wright’s home 
was the rendezvous for all Americans visiting London. This 
picture, therefore, acquires a special interest for Americans and 
becomes a sort of international link in this collection. 

SIR THOMAS LAWRENCE, P. R. A. 

1769-1830. 

Hailing from Bristol with more or less humble antecedents, 
his father at one time being an inn-keeper as well as a solicitor 
and excise man, the extraordinary genius of the painter, who 
had been advised by Sir Joshua in his teens and who had been 
made an extra associate of the Royal Academy by the “ king’s 
influence ” before he was twenty-one, brought it about 
that, on the death of Sir Joshua, Lawrence fell heir to all 
his privileges as painter to the king and to the society of the 
dilletante and, as the pet of society, inherited the cream of 
the clientele that had gone to the studios of the older portraitists, 
and was successful not only in fanciful and even sensational 
subjects, such as his “ Gypsy Girl ” but in the portrayal of 
family groups and particularly of women famed for their 
position and beauty. 

16. MISS WEST. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 30 in. 

This typical portrait of Lawrence’s represents Harriott, 
second daughter of Lt. Colonel James West of the Royal 


33 


Artillery and depicts her about at the time of her marriage 
in 1825 when she was just in her twenties and became the wife 
of William Woodgate, an eminent lawyer, of sturdy stocky type 
who, among other things, is said to have been the original of 
the “John Bull, of English tradition. Mrs. Woodgate lived 
until December 1879 and famed for her beauty in her girl¬ 
hood was known as the “ Rose of Kent.” The watch shown in 
the picture is still in possession of the Woodgate family, the 
incident in which it figures having led Sir Thomas to paint what 
is without question one of his most inspired canvases. 

JOHN LINNELL. 

1792-1882. 

The longest-lived of all the masters represented in the 
collection, Linnell covered the period of British art when it 
saw the decline of the older portrait school and the rise of the 
great landscapists, he being the contemporary of all those 
who left a mark on the art of their time, especially Constable 
and Turner. The son of a wood carver, advised as to his 
future by Benjamin West in 1805, a sort of handy man in 
art, miniaturist, engraver and mezzotinter, and exhibitor at the 
age of fifteen, Linnell carried on the traditions of the panoramic 
landscapists and threw a glamor of rich color and anecdotal 
detail over everything that he painted. 

17. THE STORM. 

Canvas, 35 in. by 56 in. 

One of the finest examples of Linnell’s art, “ The Storm,” 
painted in 1853, represents a typical summer landscape and its 
dramatic realism affords a type often seen in British art but 
rarely so signally or so successfully handled. One of the last 
pictures to be exhibited by the artist, it reveals him at the 
very height of his ability before his powers had begun their 
inevitable decline, and in style it harks back to the earlier 
period when Constable was still a name to conjure with and a 
master to be imitated. 


34 


GEORGE MORLAND. 

1763-1804. 

Of all the painters of the period, Morland represented in a 
double heredity an ability to do almost anything he wanted in 
the art of painting. The son and grandson of two well known 
painters with his mother also an artist, carefully educated, he 
started life rather comfortably in the famous house in Leicester 
Square, which afterwards became the home of Sir Joshua 
Reynolds. Familiar with city life, he also knew the life of the 
roads and of the inns, and in a way assumed the mantle of 
Hogarth as a chronicler of English life, his numerous works 
being known everywhere through their reproduction in colored 
engravings. Morland’s varied career, which, with its ups and 
downs was surcharged with an intimate acquaintance with and 
a revealed love for all the essential aspects of British life, is 
reflected in splendid style in the three canvases which appear 
in this collection. 


18. OLD COACHING DAYS. 

Canvas, 34 in. by 46 in. 

This idyll of summer time showing the Manchester coach, 
long unknown, first appeared at the Old Masters Exhibition at 
Burlington House, London, in 1888 and represents the art of 
Morland in its most mellow and characteristic phase. 


19. FRUITS OF EARLY INDUSTRY AND ECONOMY. 

Canvas, 2454 in. by 30 in. 

This typical city picture in full consonance with the older 
art of Hogarth represents Morland as the moralizer and is 
the obverse to a companion picture entitled “ The Effects of 
Youthful Extravagance and Idleness.” This study was en¬ 
graved by William Ward in 1789 and the popularity of both 

35 


subjects led to their being re-engraved a number of times. 
The poetical legend belonging to the picture runs as follows: 

Lo here, what ease, what elegance you see; 

The just reward of youthful Industry! 

The happy Grandsire looks thro’ all his race, 

Where well earn’d plenty brightens every face, 

The beauteous daughter school’d in virtue’s lore, 

Now gives th’ example she received before, 

While her fond Husband train’d to fair renown, 

Sees future laurels his brave offspring crown. 

20. THE HAPPY COTTAGERS. 

Canvas, 14 in. by 18 in. 

This purely English anecdotal picture belongs to Mor- 
land’s ideal presentations of rural life and represents his method 
of work in his thirtieth year, the kind of thing he painted to 
please himself as well as to give an opportunity to the engraver, 
with whose methods of publicity the whole art of Morland 
is entwined. 

SIR HENRY RAEBURN, R. A. 

1756-1823. 

Born in a village on the fringe of Edinborough, his father 
a manufacturer, an orphan at six, a jeweler’s apprentice at 
fifteen, a miniaturist, with his first oil dating from 1776, and 
with a final record of unexampled industry which might easily 
lead one to prove from his career that genius was a capacity for 
hard work, Raeburn, the real colossus of the North, a member 
of the Royal Academy in 1815 and knighted in 1822, as the 
King’s limner for Scotland, as an artist enjoys so tremendous a 
reputation that not even comparison with his three great rivals 
in London, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, disturb his 
position, as is convincingly revealed in the eight supreme ex¬ 
amples of his brush in this collection. 

36 


2i. LADY BELHAVEN. 

Canvas, 27 in. by 35 in. 

Penelope, Lady Belhaven, the youngest daughter of 
Ranald Macdonald of Clanranald, married William Hamilton, 
the seventh Lord Belhaven on March 2nd, 1789. Her portrait, 
by Raeburn, recalls the fact that both Van Dyke and Sir Peter 
Lely painted Lady Belhavens of an earlier period, the tranquillity 
of Raeburn’s portrait however, concealing the fact that the 
subject was the descendant of fighting clans on both sides of 
the house. 

22. LADY ELIBANK. 

Canvas, 27 in. by 34 in. 

In striking contrast to L^ly Belhaven, this portrait repre¬ 
sents Catherine, daughter of James Steuart, who married 
Alexander Murray, seventh Lord Elibank, as his second wife 
in 1804 and is Raeburn in one of his most inspired and 
vigorous moments. 

23. MASTER THOMAS BISSLAND. 

Canvas, 44 in. by 56 in. 

This handsome fair-haired boy in a green jacket and 
trousers is the son of Thomas Bissland, Collector of Customs 
at Greenock and was born in 1799. Receiving the M. A. degree 
at Oxford in 1824 he entered the church and died as the Rector 
of Hartley Maudit, Hampshire, England in 1846. 

24. MASTER JOHN CAMPBELL OF SADDELL. 

Canvas, 39 in. by 49 in. 

As great a contrast to the Bissland painting as is Lady 
Belhaven to Lady Elibank, this portrait represents the little 
boy, born in 1796, sitting on the tomb of his father and mother, 
both his parents dying in the year of his birth, a pathetic 
incident which has been sung in Scottish verse. The boy who 
in the manner of the day is attired in far from masculine 


37 


habiliments afterward became known as an all round sportsman 
and developed into a big, burly man, famous as a member of 
the Royal Caledonian Curling Club and died in October 1859. 

25. COLONEL CHARLES CHRISTIE. 

Canvas, 24^4 in. by 2954 in. 

This canvas in the small of a rather gaily dressed young 
Scot is probably a cadet of the Christie family of Durie, one 
of whose members, Margaret Christie, sat for a portrait for 
Raeburn in 1820. 

26. MR. LAWRIE OF WOODLEA. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 30 in. 

This ruddiest of Scottish squires, a typical Raeburn, lived 
at Woodlea, Castle Douglas about twenty miles from Dumfries 
and was probably a member of the Maxwelton family. 

27. ALEXANDER SHAW. 

Canvas, 24 in. by 29 in. 

One of the most famous canvases in this collection, secured 
by Mr. McFadden in 1916, Alexander Shaw, whose identity 
is unknown, represents Raeburn at the very height of his art 
in his virile, vital revelation of character and personality in 
his men for which he was famed in his own time and for which 
he has gained even greater fame since. 


28. PORTRAIT OF A GENTLEMAN. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 30 in. 

Unidentified, even as to name, this portrait of unusual charm 
challenges both the Lawrie and the Shaw and in color and 
design gives you a Raeburn which would make the reputation 
of any gallery. 


3S 


SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS, P. R. A. 

1723-1792. 

Of the greatest master of all the British school, the Nestor 
in fact, if not in age, of all his contemporaries, exhaustive 
eulogies have been written telling the story of a singularly 
successful life of a singularly brilliant technician and man of 
the world who hobnobbed with the great and the near great, 
with Johnson, Goldsmith, Garrick, Burke and the Thrales, and 
whose house in Leicester Square was a rendezvous for society 
in which royalty played its part. The son of a clergyman and 
a school master, coming from learned families on both sides 
of the house, intended for a doctor, Sir Joshua in his teens 
began to study painting and his famous voyage to Italy when 
he was twenty-six, but confirmed his inclinations which finally 
gave him in his thirtieth year an easy recognition as the 
greatest portrait painter of his day. The first president of the 
Royal Academy in 1769, blind in 1789, buried in St. Paul’s, 
where Lawrence, his successor, also lies, Reynolds ran the 
whole gamut of success and unexampled achievement, his en¬ 
during monument being his pictures which still command uni¬ 
versal acclaim. 


29. MASTER BUNBURY. 

Canvas, 24 in. by 29 in. 

Exhibited in the Royal Academy in 1781 and acclaimed as 
“charming” by Horace Walpole, Master Bunbury was the 
son of Henry Bunbury and belonged to a family, two genera¬ 
tions of which had sat to Reynolds for their portraits. His 
father was a talented artist and his mother was Miss Catherine 
Horneck, the “ Little Comedy ” of Sir Oliver Goldsmith. The 
boy thus immortalized by Sir Joshua was educated at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, secured a captaincy in 1795, was married 
and died at the Cape of Good Hope in 1798. The picture 
made such an impression on its first exhibition, that it was 
engraved in mezzotint the same year and has since been re- 

39 


produced by various processes, being one of the most popular 
pictures of child life and one of the finest examples of the art 
of the painter in his happiest vein. 

30. THE RIGHT HON. EDMUND BURKE, M. P. 

Canvas, 25 in. by 30 in. 

This portrait of the great orator and statesman and friend 
of America, who was born in Dublin in 1729 and died in 
1797, represents Burke who was the intimate friend of the 
artist, as a comparatively young man in his late thirties. 
Reynolds painted many portraits of Burke as did the other 
artists of the day, and he knew his subject from every point 
of view. 


GEORGE ROMNEY. 

1734-1802. 

Deriving from the sturdy yeomanry of Lancashire, Romney, 
whose father was a cabinet-maker, was the second of ten sons, 
never received any education worthwhile, started out as a 
carver and became apprentice to an eccentric painter, “ Count ” 
Steel, in London in his twenty-first year. The most romantic 
of the famous triumvirate, Gainsborough, Reynolds and Romney, 
the last named “ came into his own ” in London in 1762 and 
became the favorite painter of the hour, one of the most notable 
phases of his career being his infatuation for Emma Lyon, who 
was later known as Lady Hamilton the wife of Sir William 
Hamilton and the well known associate of Nelson and the 
mother of his daughter. As evidenced in this collection 
Romney’s brush disputed that of all his contemporaries and 
at its best yields to none of them. 

31. MRS. CROUCH. 

Canvas, 40 in. by 50 in. 

The title rather hides the fact that the wife of Mr. Crouch, 
a lieutenant in the Navy, was the celebrated actress and singer, 


40 


Anna Maria Phillips, famed for her exquisite beauty, for 
her manners, for her knowledge of the art, as well as the 
glory of her voice and the charm of her acting. As an actress 
she was a great success and this picture which represents her in 
an unaffected and simple pose, for which she was celebrated, 
was painted in 1787 and was engraved in 1788, the engraving 
being dedicated to Mrs. De Crespigny, one of her friends, 
whose picture also appears in this collection. 

32. MRS. DE CRESPIGNY. 

Canvas, 40 in. by 50 in. 

Dorothy, only daughter of Richard Scott, was the fourth 
wife of Philip Champion de Crespigny, a man of official 
prominence and coming of a family of ancient Huguenot line¬ 
age. She sat for Romney in 1786 and the painting which was 
brought to light at the Romney exhibitions in 1900 came into 
this collection in 1901. It is a striking pendant to the Mrs. 
Crouch and has been engraved and frequently reproduced. 

33. MRS. FINCH. 

Canvas, 28 in. by 35 in. 

The portrait of Mrs. Finch, is that of Mary, daughter 
of Lewis William Brouncker, of the island of St. Christopher, 
West Indies, who married as her first husband the Hon. 
William Clement Finch, admiral in the Royal Navy, and for a 
second husband William Strode, Esq. The picture dates from 
1789-1790 and represents a studio sketch in which Romney 
suggests rather than develops the beauty of the subject. 

34. LADY HAMILTON. 

a- 

Canvas, 15 in. by 1754 in. 

This study of the famous woman who, the daughter of a 
blacksmith and illiterate, became an ambassadress, the friend 
of queens, the love of Nelson, was of such a wanton type at 

41 


the time that Romney became infatuated with her when she 
was living with the “ Honorable ” Charles F. Greville, that 
the staidest of encyclopedias in telling of her translation into 
the household of Sir William Hamilton, the English Ambassa¬ 
dor at Naples, says “she went as the result of an agreement, 
the uncle paying his nephew’s debts, and the nephew ceding his 
mistress.” Her intrigues with Nelson began some time after 
she had given up any acquaintance with Romney and her 
picture represents her in 1783 probably as Miranda, three years 
before she went to Naples under the protection of Sir William. 
Romney has caught in his rapid brush work the almost child¬ 
like charm of the sitter when she was just eighteen with her 
extraordinary career, which ended in poverty and want at 
Calais on January 15, 1815, still before her. 

35. MRS. TICKELL. 

Canvas, 20 in. by 24 in. 

Equally inspired, this is one of Romney’s famous sketches 
in which graceful outline and the hint of beauty are the 
things aimed at, since Mrs. Tickell was one of Romney’s de¬ 
votions after Lady Hamilton had lost interest in him or he 
in her and as Miss Ley as well as Mrs. Tickell, Romney painted 
her scores of times. Of the several pictures which represented 
her at her best this one is one of the most effective and it was 
included in the “Twenty Masterpieces” exhibition in London 
in 1895 and is one of the fourteen studies of her made be¬ 
tween May, 1791 and May, 1792. 

36. LADY GRANTHAM. 

Canvas, 40 in. by 50 in. 

Mary Jemima Yorke, born 1757, the younger of the two 
daughters of the second Earl of Hardwicke, married Thomas, 
second Lord Grantham, in August, 1780, and was prominent in 
the life of the big political families of the day, her husband 
being Ambassador to Spain and Secretary of State for 

42 


Foreign Affairs. This portrait was painted between December, 
1780 and March, 1781 and represents Romney in the most 
significant phase of his grand manner in which the social distinc¬ 
tion as well as the individual charm of the sitter are mag¬ 
nificently reproduced. When secured, the picture had never 
been exhibited in England and is one of the gems of this 
collection comparing in character with the “Lady Rodney” 
of Gainsborough. 

37. the REV. JOHN WESLEY. 

Canvas, 24 in. by 30 in. 

Painted in 1789 when the famous Methodist divine was 
eighty-six, Romney has set out in this canvas all that the 
man stood for of intense spirituality and human personality. 
From the very first, the portrait, much reproduced and engraved, 
has been recognized as not only Wesley at his best, but Romney 
in one of his most sympathetic moods. 

38. LITTLE BO-PEEP. 

Canvas, 34 in. by 46 in. 

The contemporaries of Romney, Sir Joshua in particular, 
were fond of painting fanciful subjects, the “Age of Inno¬ 
cence ” of Reynolds being a case in point, which is not only 
challenged in this collection by his “ Master Bunbury ” in some 
ways more poignant than little innocence herself, but also by 
Romney’s delightful essay in the same style, in which he 
presents a child shepherdess with all the simplicity and the 
naivete which the subject demands, the original sitter not be¬ 
ing known and the painting representing the artist’s pleasure 
in playing with paint and with the picturesque. 

JAMES STARK. ^ 

1794-1859. 

The son of a master-dyer, a follower of old Crome and 
member of the Norwich school, Stark divided his time between 


43 


his beloved Norfolk and the river’s Yare, Waveny and Bure 
and London and Windsor and represents the school of Crome 
in a very individual aspect. 

39. LANDSCAPE WITH CATTLE. 

Canvas, 16 in. by 22 in. 

In this small canvas the open air school of the Norfolk 
reaches is revealed in one of its interesting - phases in that 
it is the scenery rather than the cattle that is the object of the 
painter’s solicitude, the oaks suggesting the trees beloved of 
Crome and the whole aspect of summer time suggesting the 
beauty of mellow landscapes. 

GEORGE STUBBS, R. A. 

1724-1806. 

One of the most remarkable of the British painters of 
animal life, a noted anatomist of man and animals, the son 
of a currier and leather dresser, his father dying when he 
was fifteen, Stubbs was left with a competency and had such 
a passion for the realities of form that he early announced after 
a visit to Italy that he would look into nature for his subjects 
and study her only. As an engraver of animal life, particularly 
of horses, he was famous in his time and without a peer, his 
great work on the anatomy of the horse being published 
in 1766. 

40. LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES. 

Canvas, 24 in. by 41 in. 

Reversing the usual process followed in Holland where 
the famous landscapists called on their fellow craftsmen to 
paint in figures in the scenery, Stubbs as the master of animal 
life, paints horse and dog in an inimitable manner in this 
canvas and calls on Amos Green, a landscapist who died 
in 1807, to paint the background, one of the most interesting 


44 


backgrounds in this collection. The picture dates from 1767, 
is signed by Stubbs, and tells a simple rustic story without 
affectation or pretense. 

JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM 
TURNER, R. A. 

1775-1851. 

Born in the most humble of circumstances, his father a 
barber, his mother after a bitter experience, dying early in an 
asylum, poorly educated, yet with a craving for the great 
imaginative literatures of all time, Turner is easily the most 
amazing genius in the whole history of British landscape art, 
whose eccentricities, however, as well as his achievements, serve 
to illustrate the couplet of Pope: 

Great wits to madness nearly are allied, 

And thin partition walls their states divide. 

Despite all drawbacks, a precocity who drew well at nine and 
who exhibited a real work of art at the Royal Academy when 
he was fifteen, Turner early hitched his wagon to the star of 
poesy and as representing his ideals of pictorial art set out 
these lines of Milton as his motto: 

Ye mists and exhalations that now rise 
From hill or steaming lake, dusky or grey 
Till the sun paints your fleecy skirts with gold, 

In honor of the world’s great author rise! 

This Miltonian description is all too evidently borrowed from 
the vapor-enwrapped vistas of English scenery and gave Turner 
a real point of view, which he never departed from. Deeming 
himself as a rival only to Poussin and Claude, he went from 
one sublime extravagance to another and reached the height 
of his abilities in the decade between 1829-1839 after his 
visit to Italy when he painted the “ Fighting Temeraire ” and, in 
his studies of Venice and classic pictures of the historic 
Mediterranean, evoked a dream-world of his own creation, in the 
Venetian studies being absolutely opposed to the tight style 
of Guardi and Canaletto beloved of his older associate, 


45 


Richard Wilson. During his last years, Turner produced an 
enormous mass of work of varying merit and through Ruskin’s 
extravagant appreciation of the “ master ” as flawless, and as 
all that Turner deemed himself to be, his creations became 
more or less a matter of bitter controversy, which the increas¬ 
ing eccentricities of the painter in nowise tended to mitigate. 

41. BURNING OF THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. 

Canvas, 36 in. by 47 in. 

The Houses of Parliament were destroyed by fire on 
October 16, 1834 and Turner developing the theme as a sort of 
pictorial drama, in painting his famous picture of the con¬ 
flagration in 1835, took his view from the south side of the 
Thames, looking north across the old Westminster Bridge, 
built between 1738 and 1750, which bridge is also the subject 
of Richard Wilson’s canvas in this collection. The pale towers 
of Westminster Abbey are seen through the flames and smoke 
and the conflagration represents Turner in his most inspired 
mood, he having made two large pictures of the scene and 
many pencil drawings and colored sketches, and it is believed 
that the painting in this collection is the picture of the fire 
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1835. From that time on 
the painting has been celebrated in the annals of landscape art 
and plays an extremely important part in the amazing story 
of Turner’s life and activities. 

SIR JOHN WATSON-GORDON, R. A. 

1790-1864. 

The son of a naval captain, James Watson, the artist was 
first intended for the army, but his inclinations toward paint¬ 
ing overcame all that and he assumed the name of Watson- 
Gordon in 1823, becoming the queen’s limner and being knighted 
in 1850. As a pupil of Raeburn’s, Watson-Gordon carried on 
the traditions of the Scotch school and he became president of 
the Royal Scottish Academy in 1850 at the same time as he 
became a member of the Royal Academy in London. 

46 


42. SIR WALTER SCOTT. 

Canvas, 24 y 2 in. by 29 in. 

This portrait of the celebrated poet and movelist dates 
from 1830 and in the original form was an unfinished study 
from which he painted a number of replicas, that in this 
collection being a much more interestng and finer work of art 
than the original sketch. It represents Scott in his fifty-ninth, 
year, two years before his death and as in every way the 
literary genius that the world has delighted to honor. 

RICHARD WILSON, R. A. 

1714-1782. 

The son of a clergyman who was sent to London to study 
in 1729, Wilson went to Italy soon after this and spent nearly 
twenty years enjoying life among the cognoscenti in Rome and 
absorbing the very spirit and the style of the Italian masters of 
landscape. He died in Wales in 1782, was famous for his 
aerial perspective effects and his verities of landscape within 
the conventions of his schools and he even tried his hand at 
painting Niagara from a drawing in 1774. 

43. WESTMINSTER BRIDGE, LONDON. 

Canvas, 30 in. by 53 in. 

This somewhat architecturally accurate presentation of the 
Old Westminster Bridge which was erected between 1738 and 
1750 and was supplanted by the present structure in 1860-62 
was painted in 1745 and represents the Italianate style of 
Wilson following Guardi and Canaletto, the latter by the way 
having painted the same bridge himself, in London, about 1747, 
but possesses, in addition to its historic value, a charm in it¬ 
self, by reason of its color scheme with its blue sky and its 
pearly dome of St. Paul rising above the city outlines in the 
east, the view being taken from the North side as contrasted 
with the South side from which Turner made his study of the 
destruction of the Houses of Parliament. 


47 


INDEX 


Bonington, Richard Parkes, 
5, 16, 17, 21, 22, 25, 30 
Canaletto, Antonio, 16, 45, 47 
Constable, John, 16, 17, 18, 19, 

21, 22, 25, 26, 27, 34 
Corot, Jean Baptiste Camille, 

1 7 

Cox, David, 6, 16, 21, 27 
Crome, John, 16, 17, 19, 21, 

22, 27, 28, 43, 44 
Daubigny, Charles Francois, 

1 7 

Diaz, Narcisse Virgile de la 
Pena, 17 

Delacroix, Eugene, 25 
Gainsborough, Thomas, 5, 7, 
8, 9, 11, 15, 20, 29, 30, 36, 40 
Green, Amos, 20, 44 
Guardi, Francesco, 16, 45, 47 
Harlow, George Henry, 13, 30, 
3i 

Hobbema, Meindert, 19 
Hogarth, William, 5, 6, 7, 15, 
20, 31, 32 , 35 
Hoppner, John, 12, 32 
Inness, George, 18 
Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 12 
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 8, 11, 
12, 13, 30, 32, 33 , 34 , 39 
Lely, Sir Peter, 12 
Linnell, John, 6, 16, 17, 34 
Lorraine, Claude, 15, 29, 45 
Michel, Georges, 17 
Millet, Francois, 17 


Morland, George, 19, 20, 22, 35 
Peale, Charles Willson, 12 
Poussin, Nicolas, 45 
Raeburn, Sir Henry, 7, 10, 13, 
22, 36, 37, 38 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 7, 8, 9, 
11, 12, 13, 14, 33 , 35 , 36, 39 , 
40 , 43 

Romney, George, 7, 8, 9, 11, 
14, 22, 36, 40, 4 L 42 , 43 
Rosa, Salvator, 29 
Rousseau, Pierre Etienne 
Theodore, 17 
Ruysdael, Jacob Van, 19 
Sargent, John Singer, 18 
Stark, James, 21, 43, 44 
Stuart, Gilbert, 12 
Stubbs, George, 20, 21, 44, 45 
Sully, Thomas, 12 
Turner, Joseph Mallord 
William, 6, 15, 16, 34, 45, 
46, 47 

Van Dyke, Sir Anthony, 12 
Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez 
de Silva y, 22 
Watson-Gordon, Sir John, 11, 
46, 47 

West, Benjamin, 8, 12, 26, 
33 , 34 

Wright, Joseph, 12 
Wright, Mrs. Patience, 12, 33 
Wilson, Richard, 8, 15, 16, 22, 
29, 46, 47 


48 











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